


Brighter Than Starlight

by garafthel (sister_wolf)



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, BOFA Fix-It, Character Death Fix, F/M, Implied Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-23
Updated: 2014-05-23
Packaged: 2018-01-26 05:00:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1675607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sister_wolf/pseuds/garafthel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Tauriel and Kíli manage to fall in love even though they're both socially awkward turtles. (Figuratively speaking. This is not actually a turtle!AU.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brighter Than Starlight

**Author's Note:**

> In the book timeline, the Company was imprisoned in Mirkwood for just about a month. Based on the changes that the movies made to the timeline, my best guess is that in the movieverse the Company was actually imprisoned in Mirkwood for almost two months, from late August to late October.
> 
> The song "A Wizard's Staff Has a Knob On the End" is from Terry Pratchett's brilliant _Discworld_ series. Thank you to SorchaCahill for coming up with the title of the story!

The Elves aren't particularly rough, but they are thorough--they find almost all of Fíli's hidden daggers, and there are a lot of them. 

As the red-haired Elf warrior closes Kíli into his cell, he asks her if she isn't going to search his trousers. She suggests that he has nothing at all down his trousers, which he would be offended by...except that her raised eyebrow and the slight curve to her mouth as she says it makes his heart stutter.

She's an Elf, he's a Dwarf. There's no way she'd ever look at him in a romantic way. But somehow he can't bring himself to care how foolish he's being as he sighs longingly and stares after her as she marches away.

From his cell across the way, Fíli looks at him like he's an idiot.

"What?"

Rolling his eyes, his brother shakes his head.

***

"What's your name?" Kíli asks her when she passes by his cell later that night.

"Captain," she tells him.

"Captain what?"

"Captain of the Guards."

He's sure she thinks him mad, because as soon as she raises her eyebrow at him he can't help but grin at her helplessly. She looks confused and then annoyed, and walks away without another word.

***

The red-haired Elf doesn't appear to be assigned to the prisoners but she walks through every once in a while, to keep an eye on things he guesses. She starts stopping by his cell when she walks by just to exchange a few words. 

He thinks she's curious about why he always smiles at her. Or maybe she's just lonely. He doesn't really see her talking to any of the other guards.

One night she stops by while he's using a piece of chalk to sketch out a board for a game of Fox and Hares on his floor. She looks interested when he says it's for a game and asks him to explain the rules. Kíli tries to explain the basic rules--though it's difficult not to stumble over his words when she's looking at him and paying attention to what he's saying--but then the blond Elf who always looks just like he's bitten into a sour berry shows up.

"Tauriel!" he snaps. Her eyes widen and she straightens her back as if she's been caught doing something she ought not to. Without another word to Kíli, she hurries away.

Her name is Tauriel. Kíli mouths it to himself after she's gone. _Tauriel._ It's a pretty name, he thinks.

Fíli squints at him dubiously. "Are you actually flirting with the she-Elf?"

"No! Definitely not." Cheeks flaming, Kíli throws himself down on his bunk and stares up at the ceiling. Her name is Tauriel, he thinks, and smiles to himself.

***

Kíli looks for her at about the time that she usually stops by, but Tauriel doesn't come back the next night, or the night afterward. After a few days he asks one of the other guards where she is, but the guard just looks at him like he's an insect and doesn't say anything.

***

Playing Fox and Hares while he and Fíli are in two different cells turns out to be frustrating and not much fun, so they start telling each other dirty limericks and making up new ones when they run out of old ones. Some of the others chime in--Nori turns out to have a knack for coming up with stunningly dirty limericks, and Bofur sets them to a rollicking tune. They sing increasingly filthy limericks at the top of their lungs for several hours.

For a night spent in prison, it's a pretty good night.

***

"Are you ill?"

Kíli had been lying on his bunk napping for lack of anything better to do. At first he thought he'd imagined her voice. "Tauriel?" he asks as he sits up.

She looks taken aback. "How do you know my name?"

Kíli stands up and crosses to the door. "The sour-faced blond called you Tauriel."

He strongly suspects that she wants to laugh but can't let herself. "You mean Prince Legolas."

"That the one who always looks like he's bitten into something unpleasant?"

She frowns at him, but he thinks she's trying to hide a smile. "You should show Prince Legolas more respect."

"Or what, he'll throw me in prison?" Kíli leans against the bars of his cell. "Bit late for that."

There isn't much she can say to that. There's a brief, uncomfortable silence, and then she asks, "Were you lying down because you are ill?"

"No, just bored. Where were you?" He realizes a second too late that it sounds like he was bored because she wasn't there. Well, it's the truth anyway.

"On patrol. There was another spider nest to the south..." she pauses and he wonders if she's regretting telling a prisoner even that much. "I am back for the next few days."

"I'm glad. You're certainly nicer than our other jailers."

"Has anyone mistreated you?" She looks hard and angry, all of the softness in her face gone. Kíli has no doubt that if any of the guards stepped out of line, they would regret it.

"No, they just...don't talk to us."

"It is not a guard's job to speak to the prisoners."

"I know. And yet here you are, talking with me." Kíli cocks his head to the side and gives her the smile that he's found makes barmaids fill his ale mug a little fuller.

Tauriel blinks rapidly and takes a step back. "I am relieved to hear that you are not ill." She adds something in the Elves' liquid-sounding language that Kíli can only guess means goodbye and spins around, walking away quickly.

That was not the reaction he was hoping for. Kíli sighs and makes a note to work up to the ale mug-filling smile.

Across the way, Fíli is giving him an incredulous look. "You're lucky that Uncle is on the other end of the hall. What are you thinking, flirting with an Elf?"

Switching to Khuzdul just in case any of the guards can overhear him, Kíli says, "I'm being friendly to make her drop her guard, that's all."

Fíli rolls his eyes and responds in the same language, "That's not all you're hoping she'll drop."

In the next cell over, Nori starts snickering loudly. Kíli can hear Dori demanding, "What are you laughing at?" which just makes Nori laugh even harder.

Kíli throws himself onto his bunk and covers his face with his hands, mortified. Sometimes older brothers are the _worst_.

***

She doesn't come back for several more nights. He's not pining after her, he's _not_. He just misses talking to her.

Kíli sleeps a lot and stares at the ceiling when he can't sleep. Uncle Thorin said that the Elvenking threatened to keep them imprisoned for a hundred years. He thinks about what a hundred years stuck in this cell would be like, then he tries very hard not to think about it anymore.

He holds onto the runestone that his mother gave him, tracing the carved lines over and over. He promised to come back to her, Kíli thinks. He _promised_.

***

"Oh, a wizard's staff has a knob on the end--" Kíli breaks off as he sees Tauriel approaching. She's wearing the dark-colored armor and cowl that she had been dressed in the day they were captured in the forest. The others continue on singing and he winces, expecting her to be shocked by the lyrics.

Instead she has that little hint of a smile on her face as she says, "A liberal application of linseed oil to his staff might help the wizard to avoid splinters."

Kíli blinks at her, stunned. "You just made a dirty joke."

"Did I? Hmm." The expression on her face is completely serene and blank, but he can see the mischief in her eyes. He should have realized after her "Or nothing" comment when he asked her if she was going to check his trousers--she has a dirty sense of humor.

She's the best archer he's ever seen, she's beautiful (once you get accustomed to the Elves' strangely smooth skin and lack of facial hair), and she makes slyly dirty jokes. Kíli is in love.

"Why are you staring? Do I still have spider silk in my hair?" She lifts her arms to brush at her hair with her fingers and Kíli notices that the underside of her left sleeve has a long, ragged rip in it.

"What happened to your sleeve?"

"A spider got past my guard. It is nothing."

"That doesn't look like nothing." The tear is almost the full length of her upper arm. "Why wasn't Prince Sourface protecting your back?"

"Prince Legolas," she corrects calmly but firmly. "There were many more spiders than we had anticipated. He was fighting off two spiders of his own when one caught a chance blow to my arm."

Kíli scowls. "If I'd been out there with you, I'd have made sure that no spider got anywhere near your back."

She smiles at him, a slow, closed-mouth smile that lights up her eyes and somehow makes her even more beautiful. "Thank you."

He stutters something, not even sure what he's saying. It's hard to think when she looks at him like that.

"I must go. The King will want my report." With another tiny smile, she walks away. She's all the way out of sight at the end of the hall when Kíli realizes what that means.

She stopped by to see him when she got back to the palace, before even changing her clothing. She wanted to see him even if it was only for a few minutes. She must have missed him too.

***

They have been prisoners in Mirkwood for almost two months. Outside, it's late October. The trees have probably finished turning colors and dropped all their leaves. There might be snow on the ground, the fluffy snow of early winter that's good for packing into snowballs.

The older Dwarves--the ones who remember Erebor--don't care much about the seasons one way or the other, except to complain when the snow or rain makes it hard to travel. But Kíli and Fíli were born aboveground in the years before they settled in Ered Luin. He remembers living in a little stone house in the hill country of southern Dunland with Fíli and their mother when he was young. Playing outside in the fallen leaves is one of Kíli's earliest memories.

He misses the feel of the wind and the sun on his face. He misses the still, silent moment just before he releases an arrow. He misses sitting around the campfire smoking their pipes in the evening. He never thought he'd miss anything about sleeping wrapped in a blanket on the hard ground, but he does miss being able to look up and see the distant, cold light of the stars.

He thinks that even when they retake Erebor, he'll still want to spend a good portion of his time aboveground. He loves the feel of stone under his feet, it's true, but he loves the beauty of the outside world just as much.

When Tauriel stops by his cell that evening, he's sitting on his bunk flipping his mother's runestone in the air and catching it. He's been thinking about their mam's little forge in Ered Luin, hoping that she's sold enough of her work over the summer to keep her comfortable this winter without him and Fíli there to help out. Of course now she doesn't have to worry about feeding two perpetually hungry boys, so that probably helps keep her pantry looking less bare.

Tauriel asks him about the runestone and he has a mischievous urge to tell her a tall tale about it being cursed. She gives him an uncertain look, like she's not sure whether he's gotten into Radagast's mushrooms, and turns away to leave without a word. He's noticed that she does that a lot--runs away when she doesn't know what to say. 

He doesn't want her running away again just because of his stupid little story. So he tells her the truth, that his mother gave it to him so that he would remember his promise to come back to her. Distracted by Tauriel's smile, he fumbles the catch and the runestone almost goes skittering into the chasm between the rows of cells.

Their fingers touch when she hands the stone back to him. It's the first time she's really touched him, other than shoving him into a cell (which he doesn't count as a real touch.) He can't even breathe for a moment, feeling her thin, delicate fingers brushing against his big, blunt-fingered hand. She seems like a fawn to him, all long, slender limbs and big eyes, except he knows that she's strong and brave enough to bury an arrow straight into a giant spider's eye.

He mentions the noise of the party going on upstairs and somehow that turns into talking about how much she loves the starlight. He can almost see it--Tauriel walking straight up a beam of moonlight and running fleet-footed among the stars while all that he can do is watch her longingly from afar, clumsy and earthbound.

Kíli tells her about the Fire Moon rising over Dunland, how beautiful it had been. She sits down on the step to listen to him and he realizes that as often as they've spoken over the past few months, this is the first time she's relaxed enough to sit down. He wonders if she could come to like him the way that he likes her, if it's even possible. Probably not, he thinks.

But at least he has this to hold onto, that she's staying to talk to him even though there are probably dozens of other things she could be doing tonight. She could be upstairs drinking wine with the other Elves right now. The prisoners aren't her responsibility; she's not their jailer. So she is willingly spending her evening talking to him instead of any of her own folk. He holds that fact to his heart like an ember, warming him all the way through.

"What are you smiling about?" she asks.

Kíli almost answers _you_ but catches himself just in time. "I'm just enjoying the conversation."

Her lips curve and her eyes warm with her smile. "So am I."

***

When Bilbo appears seemingly out of thin air with a set of keys and an escape plan, Kíli doesn't even hesitate for a moment. He wants out of his cell, he wants to be able to run and hunt and do anything that's not just sitting in one place, and he wants to breathe the fresh air again.

It's only later, as they're floating silently in wine barrels under the palace waiting for Bilbo to join them, that he realizes that last night might be the last time he ever speaks to Tauriel. He's an escaped prisoner now. If they ever meet again, she'll be trying to capture him. 

Maybe once they take back Erebor, Uncle Thorin can make peace with King Thranduil. Kíli could be the ambassador to Mirkwood. He'd make a _great_ ambassador.

Once Bilbo joins them, they start paddling downstream until the current grabs them and throws them around. It's fantastic--he's drenched, half-drowned, and laughing out loud as the barrels barely stay afloat in the white water. He'd love to do it again, except that not only are they escaping from the Elvenking, it turns out that Orcs are after them.

The Orcs chase them down the river, firing arrows at them and trying to leap onto the barrels from the shore. Then the Elves appear out of nowhere led by Tauriel and the sour blond prince, shooting the Orcs as they leap out of the trees. Kíli has his hands full fighting off the Orcs, but every time he catches a glimpse of Tauriel he's momentarily distracted by her grace and deadliness.

Then they reach the river gate and Kíli can only see one way out of the trap--he's going to have to pull the lever. Fíli tells him later that it's the dumbest stunt he's ever pulled and that he's lucky he's alive.

But Kíli knows it wasn't luck--it was Tauriel. She was the one who killed the Orc before it could shoot him again. She saved his life.

He tells himself that she would have done the same for anyone, but the look in her eyes when she'd seen that he had been shot stays with him. Tauriel had seen him in mortal danger and she had been afraid for him. She cares about him, at least a little.

***

As his fever builds in Lake-Town, Kíli starts losing track of time. One second he's watching his uncle and the Company leave them behind, and the next he's barely keeping to his feet while Fíli pleads for Bard to give them shelter.

He loses time again and the next thing he knows he's lying on a table. "Sorry," he tells Fíli, who is wiping his forehead with a wet cloth that feels icy cold against his skin. "Sorry to be so much trouble."

"No. You've nothing to feel sorry for, so shut up and save your energy." Fíli looks almost as bad as Kíli feels, dark shadows under his eyes and lines of exhaustion on his face. 

When was the last time they'd had a full night's sleep? Was it two nights ago when he and Tauriel had talked until long past midnight, or was that three nights ago? He can't remember. "I just wish I could have talked to her again."

Fíli wrings out the rag and dips it into a bowl sitting on the table by Kíli's head before returning to wiping his forehead.

Kíli hisses in discomfort. "It's cold."

"And you're burning up with fever, so stop whining." There's silence for a few minutes, and then Fíli asks, "You really like the she-Elf?"

"Tauriel," he says, feeling himself smile as he says her name.

Fíli shakes his head. "Can't say I understand your taste in women. Me, I like a girl I don't have to stand on a footstool to kiss."

"Where are you going to find a woman that short?" Kíli laughs and then starts coughing uncontrollably. His lungs feel like they're full of broken glass. When he finally manages to stop coughing, he rasps, "I guess you could find yourself a Hobbit girl."

"Ass." Fíli smiles, but Kíli can see the worry lurking in his eyes. "The Hobbit girls liked me, though, true enough. That one with the curly hair, you remember her?"

"They all had curly hair," Kíli says as his eyes start drifting closed despite his best efforts to stay awake. If his brother replies he doesn't hear it, falling into unconsciousness as if he's just walked off a cliff.

***

There are Orcs in Bard's house. Kíli isn't entirely sure whether he's still dreaming as he tries to fight them off. He thinks that Tauriel is there protecting him, but he must be imagining that. Tauriel doesn't belong in Bard's cramped little house that smells of fish and lake water. She can't be here.

Then suddenly the Orcs are gone and he's lying on the table again. He's still dreaming, obviously, because Tauriel is standing next to the table and she's glowing as if she's lit from within. He likes this dream a lot better than the one with the Orcs.

She's so beautiful and so impossible that he tells her everything, tells her how he feels and asks her if she could have loved him. 

It's only after he asks her and he sees the hesitation in her eyes that he realizes he's not dreaming. She's real and she's standing there beside him, hesitating and uncertain. He already knows what she does when she doesn't know what to say--she runs away.

So he's not surprised when Tauriel gives him a wide-eyed look and then disappears through the kicked-in door to Bard's house, but it still hurts like his chest is caving in when she leaves.

***

If he could catch his breath, he'd make a joke like, "No, _this_ is what it hurts like when your chest is caved in," but no one would hear him anyway. 

Kíli blinks the blood and sweat out of his eyes and stares up at the sky. His chest hurts like fire with every halting breath he takes. He knows he has several broken ribs where Azog's mace hit him. He's terribly afraid that one of his ribs has pierced a lung because he can taste blood on his lips every time he breathes out.

He has to get up. The last thing he saw before Azog's mace sent him flying was Uncle Thorin lying terribly still on the ground. If Kíli is down too, that means Fíli is on his own against the Pale Orc. He has to get up.

He gets as far as rolling on his side before the pain makes him grey out. Kíli lies still for a moment and concentrates very hard on not throwing up. If just breathing hurts this much he doesn't want to imagine how much _that_ would hurt.

He's going to get up in just a minute. He just...needs to rest first.

"Kíli!"

He thinks he's imagining Tauriel's voice at first. She sounds ragged, desperate. What would she be doing down here, though? She was on the hill with the other Mirkwood archers, not here in the valley where the worst of the fighting happened. She can't be here.

"Kíli!"

 _I'm here_ , he tries to say, in case it really is Tauriel and she's trying to find him. What emerges is a sort of broken croak that sounds nothing like words. She's never going to find him if he can't even tell her where he is. Kíli thumps his hand on the ground in frustration, fighting back tears of pain.

"Kíli!" Tauriel falls to her knees beside him. He blinks up at her, trying to figure out if she's real. She has blood on her face and her armor is filthy with gore. That makes him think she probably is real, because he couldn't possibly have imagined her being filthy when Elves seem to always be perfectly clean.

"Real," he croaks.

She must have thought he was trying to say her name, because she nods and says, "I am here," as she reaches out a hand to brush his hair out of his face.

"Uncle and Fíli." His voice is so thready that he can barely even understand himself.

"They are alive. Bilbo Baggins killed Azog with an Elvish dagger."

 _They're alive._ Good old Bilbo. Kíli smiles, feeling himself start to fade away. The pain is almost gone.

"Kíli!"

He blinks his eyes open. There are wet tracks through the blood and dirt on Tauriel's face. Is she crying over him?

"You asked me a question in Lake-Town. I did not know how to answer then. I know my answer now."

 _Tell me,_ he mouths.

She smiles at him, tears sliding down her cheeks. "I will not tell you until you can stand on your own two feet and ask me again."

 _What?_ That's not fair.

"Yes, get angry at me. Fight. Do not give up."

He's so tired, though. He just wants to sleep.

"I cannot save you unless you fight for yourself. Kíli, please promise me you will not give up. Please."

He can't say no to her, not when she sounds so desperate. Kíli nods reluctantly.

"This will hurt," she says as she holds her hands out over his chest. "Rather a lot, most likely."

 _What are you going to do?_ he mouths.

She bites her lip. "Something very dangerous. Don't worry, I know how to do this. In theory."

He's about to ask her _What?_ but then the pain hits and he's screaming soundlessly. Above him, she's glowing and chanting like before but this time she doesn't look peaceful--she looks like this is hurting her just as much as it's hurting him.

The glow builds until it's blinding, so bright that he can't look at her anymore. He hears her chanting, her voice sounding hoarse as if she's been screaming for hours. The pain is almost unendurable but Kíli holds on. He can't give up. He _promised_.

The glow builds and builds, until suddenly it's gone and he tips headfirst into the soothing darkness.

***

Inside the Healer's Tent, Uncle Thorin is sleeping peacefully. Bilbo sits watching over him from his stool next to Uncle's cot, as he has been every night since the Battle. Kíli nods to Bilbo and then crosses the tent to Fíli's bedside.

Fíli is sitting propped up by pillows, his left leg held immobile in a complex-looking contraption of Oin's invention. He's reading a heavy tome with a little line of concentration between his eyebrows. "Go find her," he says without looking up from his book.

"Find who?"

Fíli gives him an exasperated look. "Go find your Elf girl and stop mooning about the place sighing like a lovestruck cow. Some of us have reading to do."

Kíli huffs a sigh. "Being King is going to make you as dull as Uncle." Thorin's first act upon regaining consciousness was to abdicate the throne; his second was to apologize to Bilbo for everything he'd said and done in his madness. Based on the fact that the Hobbit hasn't left his bedside since, Kíli would guess that he's been forgiven.

"Go, or I'll tell Oin you need another examination."

"I'm going, I'm going!"

Outside, the camp is settling down to rest. They've been working from dawn till dusk every day, first to gather the wounded from the battlefield and bury their dead, then to clear the rubble enough to make Erebor safe for habitation. Smaug's pursuit of the Company through Erebor had broken pillars and made walls and ceilings unstable. Strangely helpful ever since the Battle, Thranduil had split his forces between helping to restore Erebor and Dale. Kíli never thought he'd see the day that Elves willingly helped to clean up a Dwarven kingdom.

So he's been busy, very busy, ever since waking up from what he had been told was a healing coma the day after the Battle. But that isn't the real reason why Kíli hasn't been alone with Tauriel since the Battle.

Truthfully? He has a question to ask her and he's afraid that he already knows what her answer will be.

But enough being a coward. Tonight he stops running away.

He finds her sitting on a rocky outcrop partway up the southern slope of the mountain. It snowed yesterday, covering the bloodstained rock of the valley with a blanket of pure white. It seems unimaginable that just a few days ago this cliff overlooked a battlefield covered with the dead and wounded.

She glances over her shoulder as he approaches and he stops, struck dumb by how beautiful she is in the moonlight. Her eyebrows quirk as she watches him and he shakes himself out of it and joins her, sitting on the edge of the cliff with his legs dangling over a thirty foot drop.

They're silent for a few minutes. Kíli chews on his thumb, trying to work up the courage to talk to her. It's stupid--he never had a problem talking to her before when he was a prisoner.

"You have a question for me?" she finally prompts.

Kíli glances over at her, still chewing on his thumb. He drops his hand and clears his throat. "Ah, yes. I should be standing for this, right?"

She shakes her head. "No need to stand. You already know what my answer is, do you not?"

Disappointment is a burning stone in his gut. "Right, well. I'll just...go, then." He stands up, ready to crawl away with his tail between his legs, but she reaches up to grab his hand before he can walk away.

Her head is cocked to the side and she looks puzzled. "My answer is yes," she says slowly.

"Yes?"

"Yes." She sounds a little exasperated.

Kíli frowns as he tries to remember exactly how he'd phrased the question. He'd been a little out of his mind with fever at the time. "So you...could love me?"

Tauriel looks up at him and smiles, the warm-eyed, open smile that belongs only to him. "Do," she says. "I _do_ love you."

"Oh," he says, blinking at her.

"So..." She bites her lip. "I would very much like it if we could kiss now."

"Oh!" Kíli has to laugh at himself for being so slow and she starts laughing too, a joyous, bell-like sound.

And so it is that they're both laughing when they finally kiss, high up on the slopes of the Lonely Mountain with the stars that she loves shining all around them.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Brighter Than Starlight [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4034875) by [the_dragongirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_dragongirl/pseuds/the_dragongirl)




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